ARTIST STATEMENT: 2013
Transforming interior states into a visual language is what drives me as an artist. To quote Carl Jung, “In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order”. These days I am willing to embrace chaos, in the hopes of finding/creating that secret order. For years my artistic language consisted of iconic shapes and symbols, reduced to their simplest forms and interacting with each other, both formally and conceptually. I gradually began to break these elements up into pieces of images. Recently they have disintegrated further into fragments of thoughts, gestural marks, and scribbles – hovering in undefined, unrestrained atmospheric spaces. Each painting hints at a narrative based on the way I envision energy, ideas, matter, psychic states, memories and other elements interacting. A blue atmospheric corner may represent a safe haven; a dark corner, a danger zone. A shape may be trying to reach or move through an area, encountering visual and/or psychic roadblocks; an image might disintegrate and be transformed into something new. These encounters might be happening inside a brain, inside a supercollider, or under a microscope; there is no definative interpretation. The process also becomes a part of the narrative. The wood surfaces are sanded, drawn on, painted over, wiped off and otherwise distressed as one thought or story or gives way to the next. The history of process and transformation evident in the finished paintings reminds the viewer of the inevitability of change and the impermanence inherent in all things.
2009 Interview of Barbara by Constance Humphries
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